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The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing
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Product Description
In early 2000 two extraordinary paintings by Poussin hung in the Getty Museum in a single room, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (National Gallery, London) and the Getty's own Landscape with a Calm. Clark found himself returning to the gallery to look at these paintings morning after morning, and almost involuntarily he began to record his shifting responses in a notebook. The result is a riveting analysis of the two landscapes and their different views of life and death, but more, a chronicle of an investigation into the very nature of visual complexity. Clark’s meditations—sometimes directly personal, sometimes speaking to the wider politics of our present image-world—track the experience of viewing art through all its real-life twists and turns.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #373559 in Books
- Published on: 2008-04-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
"'The Sight of Death is a characteristically mobile text - lucid, dogged, swankily sophisticated, intractably self-conscious, humorous, agonised, driven.' Tom Lubbock, The Independent 'The plain subtlety of the writing and the beautiful reproductions throughout make the experience of reading the book akin to the process Clark is describing... It is not incidental that at a time when there is more visual art than ever before, most writing about the visual arts is either mind-numbingly pretentious and cliquey or boringly descriptive and without vision. Clark's book could not be more timely.' Adam Phillips, The Observer 'Forget blockbuster exhibitions: this is the way to see pictures.' Anita Brookner, The Spectator 'A revelatory exercise in art criticism.' Matthew Sweet, The Independent on Sunday"
About the Author
Customer Reviews
Dwelling Beautifully on "Affliction"
Reviewed as a radical departure in art writing, it is a departure only from the postmodern mordancy. Although a good book, with some insights about the Poussin's Landscape with a Calm and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, I became bored with Clark's diary of his somewhat predictable relationships with the paintings. His views are motivated by seeing "A socialism, if that's what we shall persist in calling it, that starts from misfortune, pain, and death." p 240
His response to these paintings and his own emotions dwells on "Affliction, misfortune, distress-of course Landscape with a Snake matters preeminently, and has held my attention so long, because it is my example of a coming to terms with the horror of nature that posits a "Huerte, huerte" ["Today, today" referring to Bach's Actus Tragicus] here in the horror, now in the moment of revulsion."
The horrors, to me, are smallish in the whole of Poussin's landscapes, somewhat like Breughel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
I am not moved by Clark's socio-philosophy, but his writing is fluid and personal to some extent.
A study of two paintings by Poussin
Art historian T.J.Clark studies two of Poussin's landscape works, noting his thoughts as he sits before them together at a California museum in this experiment in stream of consciousness writing, recording his moment to moment reactions. Though an interesting and microscopic analysis detailing the painter's craft, written with artistic and scholarly style, the author meanders through the landscape of his thoughts in tangents lacking focus and goal, providing little innovation to the discipline of aesthetics. An impressive display of his formidable intellect, but not his most productive work.
The Publisher Needs Glasses
A marvelous book -- evocative, erudite, beautifully written. For me, the stamp of distinction in writing appears when I find myself engaged in a conversation with the author, when the written word becomes a voice inviting some kind of verbal response, when the voice appears with a gentle tap on the shoulder at breakfast or during a boring meeting and says "Hey, have you given any thought to what I was trying to pull off about the use of space in Poussin's paintings?" and I say "Why yes I have ...." Just about every page of this book achieves that distinction, UNTIL I CAME TO THE PHANTOM PAGE 103.
Oh, yes, page 103. Nothing Professor Clark did. The publisher, on the other hand, needs to be made aware that pages 103-118 are missing and pages 119-134 were inserted twice. This means that anyone who buys this book online runs the risk of receiving a poor copy. Of course, the missing pages most likely can be had from the publisher, but even so the interruption is pretty annoying. I wouldn't mind so much if the writing was bad or banal (or both), but Professor Clark's book has legs and is deserving of better care from the publisher.
On the other hand, one can have a surrealistic good time trying to make sense out of the sentence created by the missing pages: "Various corrections, then, as I check my intuitions against the facts; but the point about the screen of trees in Snake can just about stand -- at worms always lurking in buds) into something else."
